


All In - Part 2

by InfoInfo209



Category: Love Live! Sunshine!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Bandits & Outlaws, Confessions, F/F, Running Away, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 00:58:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12377616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfoInfo209/pseuds/InfoInfo209
Summary: Day 4 of ChikaRiko week. Confessions/AU. Part 2 of 3 of All In, my Day 2 contribution.  As Riko grows closer to Chika ever since their first meeting, she decides to investigate her mysterious past that led her to this small town.





	All In - Part 2

It's been two weeks since that first night of poker with Chika Takami. It doesn't even seem like it's rained since then. She feels like a complete force of nature, and I'm honestly not sure how much of her I can take. At the very least, I know that I haven't quite hit that limit yet. I feel like I would have known if she had been here for a while, so I decided to ask You a little bit about her.

"Oh, so you've been hanging out with Chika more?" she says, standing in my office and puffing a cigar out of the window, "Yeah, she's from out of town. Or well, she's from here; it's just she's been away for a while. I used to get in a lot of trouble with her when we were both kids."

I sit at my desk, watching her as the sunlight occasionally glares in her eyes and she winces away. "I have an ashtray for a reason you know," I say, sliding it towards the seat across the desk from me, "You're going to get ashes everywhere if you just stand by the window. It's windy out." Her hair blowing raggedly through her face is enough of a testament to that. She sighs and walks over to the chair, sitting down and setting the cigar down in the tray. "So what you're saying is Chika's not exactly the type to stay in one place?"

You tosses her head back. "I mean, I wouldn't exactly say that..." she says, "It's just... Well, she loved this town, enough to live her whole life here. So when she left, it was kind of a shock. She just up and disappeared one night without a word. She hasn't talked to me about it since she got back, either." She looks glum, stretching her hands over her head. "I'm pretty sure I've seen her running around town with some other strange girl, too. I never got a good look at her face."

Some other girl? I don't know if I was quite hoping for something special with Chika still, but hearing that did at the very least deal a blow to my psyche. It's not like either of us know who this girl is. For all we know, she could be just a friend... like the two of us. "Do you think I could get her to open up about some of that?"

She looks at me with cold eyes for a moment, but they turn soft and hollow. I don't think I've seen that sort of emptiness in You before. "Knowing you, you probably could." She leans forward and grabs the cigar again, tapping off a bit more ash before puffing away at it. You's father is a somewhat prominent businessman in this area, and You does her fair share of work as a sort of middleman for his meetings. That is to say she's nowhere close to poor, especially for these parts, but she's not quite rich enough to support with absolute comfort the lavish lifestyle of cars, cigars, and gambling that she has.

She stands up and shoves the last remains of her cigar butt into the ashtray, leaving it smoking and starting her walk over towards the entrance of the room without another word. She stops on the way across and looks at the old piano that I keep sitting against the wall across from the window. She grabs the scribbled sheet music sitting on the desk stand, looking it over for a moment. "Is this a new song? It looks good."

"How does it look good? You can't read music."

She smiles at me, setting it back down. "I meant it looks finished. Anyway, I'll stop clogging up your room for the day. Thanks for everything." She waves and finishes her stroll to the exit, making a rather loud thud as she shuts the door behind her. The door always sounds louder when You Watanabe closes it.

At the very least, she was almost right about one thing. The song wasn't quite finished. There was still one final touch that needed to be made before I could truly call it complete. This song wasn't done until Chika listened to it.

-

As it so happens, Chika had invited me for a date later that evening. We went to this local saloon that she raved about, and it was surprisingly good. The building itself was as dim as the others in the town, but the food was phenominal. In a way, it almost complemented the dreary ambience in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on. If this were a fine restaurant in the city, I'm sure the same exact meal wouldn't have tasted as good. Chika seemed to know all sorts of secrets like this that I had never figured out in all my time here.

For the most part, I just let her talk. Once she got started, it felt like she would just keep going forever until you stopped her. That wasn't entirely the case in reality, however, since every so often she would put her chaotic and disconnected rambling to a sudden, screeching halt in order to ask something about me. I never quite expected it, so I would have to swallow my food down and clear my throat, all while she waited and looked at me with her big patient eyes. When I told her stories about myself, she seemed so brilliantly enthused, like her eyes lit up like miniature suns.

Naturally, in spite of my nerves, I managed to invite her back to my office to listen to the song. I don't know what I was so worked up over; it wasn't as if I was inviting her back to my bedroom or anything. Even thinking of that possibility now is making me shiver.

Together now, we sit in my office, with me on the bench of the piano and her sitting with crossed-legs on the floor. "You can always just pull aside the chair, you know," I tell her. She only insists that she enjoys the feel of it all from down there. With a sigh, I accept her silly whim and begin playing the piece.

It's been quite a long while since I've played alone in front of someone like this, to say the least. I don't know how to explain the feeling. For starters, in spite of the time between plays, it all felt so familiar, as if it was only yesterday when I was last playing for You. Rather, it felt like it had only been yesterday since I last played for Chika. The enraptured look on her face was so hauntingly known, like the lost memory of a dream that has long since faded.

When I finish, there's a moment of silence. Soon, though, it's broken by Chika's passionate clapping, as if she was simply taking the pause to make sure I wasn't going to play more. "Amazing, Riko! It's... That's it! That's what I love about this town!"

"This town?"

She sits there for a moment, putting a hand to her chin. "You see, it's like... You know how there's a beach about an hour or two west of here? Well, sometimes, if you go to a real high point or just stand still for little bit in the sun, you can sort of smell the ocean wind! That's what that song felt like!"

I blush, unsure of what to do with her enthusiastic praise. I should have probably expected something like this from her, but it still catches me off guard nonetheless. "The city I moved from was probably closer to the beach, you know... If the song reminded you of the ocean, it was probably because I was from there, instead of here." I don't know what sort of comfort I'm looking for in hunting down logic to discredit her loving interpretation.

"Then you were carried in on the wind, too!"

I cough. There's a tension hanging in the air as she just smiles up at me.

"Why did..." I say, slowly, "Why did you come back here? Why did you leave so suddenly, if you love this place so much?" I don't know why the question came to mind right then. Maybe I just needed to distract myself from the awkward anxiety brought about by her compliment. Maybe it was all I had been thinking about all night, ever since my conversation with You.

There's another silence, and I look down at Chika as I see the softness disappear from her face. She looks cold and sharp, but fragile, like a pile of shattered glass. "You told you, huh?" she says, giving a hollow smile, "I guess... I wanted to tell you this for a while, but I was afraid you would hate me. After hearing your song, though, I feel like I love you, even if you do hate me after this. You know what I mean?"

I don't say anything, feeling my heart about to beat out of my chest as I look at her soft, sad eyes. I had never seen her so vulnerable, except for maybe that first night in the bar, when she asked about my music. At the time, I never would have thought to describe what I saw in her as vulnerability.

"I guess I am just stalling my answer, huh?" she says, scratching the back of her head. She stands up and walks to the window, standing almost exactly like You with her cigar earlier. "It was years ago, when we were all kids - me, You, and Kanan. We were the three troublemakers, y'know? The sheriff was always trying to catch us on something, but he couldn't exactly stop a few young punks from drinking and causing ruckus, especially not with You's dad being so important and all. Then, one day, it happened..."

She stops, leaning forward and laying her head down in her folded arms on the window ledge. After a moment, I take it as my cue, like when she would wait for me to answer her questions at dinner. Now, it was my turn to ask. "What happened?"

"I think..." she says, "... we almost killed someone."

"How?"

"You was passed out already by that point. We were joyriding her car - or well, it was her dad's car back then - and we..." She chokes up, rubbing her face into the crook of her elbow to messily hide her tears, even though I was nowhere near an angle where I could see her face. "I was an idiot. I shouldn't have ran. I made Kanan come with me, too. I thought maybe we'd become outlaws and we'd... I don't know, mostly I thought... I thought that if the blame was on us, that You wouldn't get in any trouble. It was stupid."

"What happened to the person you hit?"

She snorted, her voice ugly and distorted from crying. I might have been the first person she told since it happened. She's been holding this weight ever since she was young. "It was hard to get word from here, with us being vagabonds and all. He was apparently in a coma for like six months. You's dad paid all the medical costs and the guy didn't have any family, so nobody pressed any charges. We were never outlaws at all, but... even after I knew that, I was too scared to come back. Kanan wanted to come back and properly apologize, but she stayed by my side instead, even though I really didn't deserve it."

I stood up slowly from the piano, closing the lid as gently as I could over the keys. "It didn't sound like You knew anything when I talked to her."

"Her dad must have made up some story so she wouldn't blame herself. So many people have been lying to her all this time to protect her from one bad memory that was resolved years ago."

"You should tell her the truth. I think she's strong enough."

"I know she is. I just don't think I am."

I walked over to the window, next to her, and I looked down at her. It wasn't the same cocksure grin that she wore on our first night, but this was her laying down another hand nonetheless. "You didn't have to tell me all of this. You could have lied." It was my turn to answer her wager again. "You want me to tell her the truth. Is that why you confessed everything?"

She turned to me with a pained expression. "That's part of the reason. I mean, even if you don't tell her, Kanan will eventually. Part of it is that, if I lied, you woulda just saw through it. If there was one thing I learned about you that first night, it's that you see right through my poker face." She smiled at me, for the first time since this confession started. She was right though; I could tell it was all a bluff. "Part of it is..." She trailed off, standing up and walking away from the window.

"Part of it is what?" I gripped my hand down against the ledge and spun to face her, watching as she opened the door to the office. She was leaving. "Part of it is what, Chika!?"

"It hurt me a lot to come back to this town." She held the door open, standing in the entryway. "Kanan wanted to come back and try and live a normal life. I just wanted to get everything off my chest before I leave, for good, as far as I can go. Part of telling you all this was my way of saying goodbye. I couldn't just disappear without telling anyone a second time. I'm sorry." Things were going too fast again. The door was closing before I even had a chance to process what she was saying. I started to say her name, but it only hung on my lips. When the door shut, it was even louder than that morning. I didn't think it was possible to outdo You in that regards.

I was frozen. I could barely lift one foot in front of the other, but eventually I managed to stagger over to the piano and sit down, laying my arms across the closed lid and sitting there. I felt exhausted, like a whole year had just passed in the last fifteen minutes. I looked up at the sheet music, looming over my head like it was mocking me. The song had finished.

If it was any consolation, I didn't hate her.

I still didn't know what my limit was for dealing with Chika, but I did know that even though this all put me frighteningly closer to that edge, I wasn't there yet. I wasn't done with Chika yet. I still had another song in me.

I lifted up the lid, and I placed my shaking hands down on the keys, looking at them as they trembled and trying my best to calm myself down. There was still one more piece she needed to hear before I let her leave me like this. As long as she was still here tomorrow, I was going to play her my encore.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow-up to my Day 2 contribution for ChikaRiko week. Once ChikaRiko week is over, I'm probably going to edit all of this together into one long, multi-chapter reupload. For now, though, I'm keeping them separate. I decided to do a three-part series, with one chapter of this AU for each even-numbered day of ChikaRiko week, so expect the final part -EDIT- soon, it's taking a bit longer than expected -EDIT- for Day 6. Thank you for reading! Don't forget to leave kudos or a comment to stroke my massive ego!


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